The main point of search - how it converts your visits to sales and how often your customers use it. $200-$300 per year is expensive for you? But what you say, if the better experience of CloudSearch increases your conversion rate and your sales grows for 5%-15%?

According to our statistic, customers use one search request per 11 pageviews. Every second customer use search during his session on the web-site.

As X-Cart CEO I should say that it is big failure that we still do not have search feature on our main website (www.x-cart.com). It is one of the main tasks for our web-site team to solve all the technical difficulties and implement search engine to our web-site. As far as you may know, the CloudSearch will be also integrated into X-Cart admin area to provide with instant results for help articles depended on opened section. I believe, that very important to give your customers the needed thing as quickly as you can. As soon as they think about something, you need to show them it on your website.

Maxim,

I am a very satisfied CloudSearch customer. Nikita's continued support and improvements have made CloudSearch a great user experience. Adding basic admin stats has been a great upgrade.

Seeing what my customers are searching for allows me to make content that meets their needs. For example, we have a product that is intended for a specific use. But it also can be used for a secondary or even tertiary use with great results. Evaluating what the customer is actual looking for helps us fine-tune our message.

Not sure why nobody has mentioned about altered carts predictive search....
It will instantly show which category and manufacturer the search is found...
Smart search will also find content in static pages and XCMS...
It's all about finding content and not just products.

i also interested in cloudsearch, but the prices are not reasonable. i think "Prestashop like" modules are really needed.

I am using Altered Cart search since last many years now & I can tell you it's very working very well, even from mobile also
CloudSearch is new age solution. But as mentioned by you the pricing strategy is not reasonable . I hate subscription based plans actually. I have 20000 thousand products & products prices ranges from $1 to $20 so it's not at all affordable to me.
They should introduce self hosted solution. many of us now own dedicated powerful server then why it's not possible to host it on own server.
If you have less than 100 products & your product price range is high then you should go with cloud search.

so what is the best search for now? we still looking for fast and good search

Search module comes with Reboot is pretty good.
Still if you can invest then I would recommend go for Cloud Search...it's just amazing. It has got some nice options for example many time customer search for products for which you might not have set key words in product name of description but you can allot this keywords to cloud search option so customer will find out the product quickly.

It has got product priority tool to display top products on first place in results.
For example you can set option like that if customer search for iphone then instead of iphone 5 it will display iphone 7 on top place. This way you can promote your top products very easily.